OMG They played the wrong anthem for Men's Medal Ceremony. So there was no listening to the music being played. Medalists posed for pictures and got off the podium. Patrick was probably not too pleased. For Ladies, they didn't even announce the national anthem. Everybody just carried on with their business while the music played.
:sheesh:

SkateFiguring, you analysed somewhere else about PCS points judged by 9 judges and concluded that only one judge was judging against Chan and the others were quite pro Chan.
Being aware of the nationalities of 9 judges - Japan, China, US, Canada, Germany, Czech, Russia, Belgium, France, I assumed the said judge is a Japanese. However, I found some interesting things.

That was not that simple. Maybe the judge X is Japanese but s/he did not show obvious favortism to Japanese guys. And the judge X's scores were somewhat problematic - s/he gave Chan's IN higher points than his SS, TR, PE and CH!
If s/he was against Chan, wouldn't s/he had given even lower scores PE, CH and IN than SS and TR?

SkateFiguring, you analysed somewhere else about PCS points judged by 9 judges and concluded that only one judge was judging against Chan and the others were quite pro Chan.
Being aware of the nationalities of 9 judges - Japan, China, US, Canada, Germany, Czech, Russia, Belgium, France, I assumed the said judge is a Japanese. However, I found some interesting things.

That was not that simple. Maybe the judge X is Japanese but s/he did not show obvious favortism to Japanese guys. And the judge X's scores were somewhat problematic - s/he gave Chan's IN higher points than his SS, TR, PE and CH!
If s/he was against Chan, wouldn't s/he had given even lower scores PE, CH and IN than SS and TR?

Food for thoughts.

Firstly, let me suggest to anybody interested to click on "Reply With Quote" under my original post to view the table of scores more easily.

1. If the nationalities of the judges are as you stated, the Japanese judge does seem to favor Kozuka and Oda, or at least fair to them relative to other skaters other than Chan. It stands out that way when looking at the table. Koz and Oda deserved high scores compared to most other skaters. But Chan the eventual winner was the threat and rightful rival and his scores by this judge were on par with or less than those of the eventual last placer with second last placed LP.

2. What you consider problematic in individual PCS of Chan by this judge is really the difference/disagreement between your personal opinion and that of said Judge, or indeed the entire judging panel which on the whole gave Chan IN marks higher than all other components as can be seen in this ISU table. This is not where you can conclude on this judge's personal bias for or against Chan, just his/her own evaluation on individual components by Chan.

I try to compare all the judges' scoring against one another in a more holistic way. The bottom line, as I stated before, this judge gave Chan the lowest, and way out of the corridor, scores in both element GOE and PCS, something no other judges did to any other skater.

Again assuming the nationalities of the judges are as you stated, the other more obvious bias I can see is that of the Czech judge who seems to really like Kozuka and Verner. S/he gave almost identical scoring to Verner as to Kozuka. The TES for Verner is way out-of-the-corridor high. This is the kind of thing that stands out looking at the table I made.

Biases can be for your favored skater or against the rival of your favored skater. It seems the Czech judge did the former while the Japanese judge did the latter, an understandable choice since there were two Japanese contenders and Chan skated between them. This judge also needed Chan lower than Kozuka in case Oda bombed.

I want to point out that GOE points by judges in themselves would not necessarily determine the final rankings because the predetermined individual element base value and the Tech Panel decide the total TES Base Values on which the GOEs and final TES are based. GOE points and PCS, however, are where the judges have the power. Having a panel of nine cuts down the influence of an individual judge.

Knowing the Judges' nationalities, again assuming they are indeed in the order you put them, I may have a little fun looking through that table again.

^ If I am not mistaken, the judges are listed in random order separately for each skater. In other words, judge number one for Chan is not the same as judge number one for Kozuka.

I believe the ISU started doing it this way two years ago expressly to make this kind of analysis impossible, thus further protecting judges' anonymity. Isn't this right?

The judge listed first for Chan was indeed the only one that was not star-struck by Patrick's Skating Skills and Transitions. But he/she liked Chan's P&E, Choreo and Interpretation just fine.

Comparing to Takahashi's scores, if Chan's judge number one is Takahashi's judge number seven, then indeed this judge boosted Daisuke at the expense of Patrick. But if Chan's judge number one is Takahashi's judge number eight, then this judge just scored everyone tougher than most of the panel did.

Mathman, I recalled there were measures to mix up the judges' scoring to conceal their identities, which is why I kept qualifying that all observations drawn were conditional on the nationalities of judges being indeed as reported by Sunny and staying in that order.

If the scores were mixed the way you described, then even my original table didn't mean a thing. It just happened that all lowest PC scores and most lowest GOEs for Chan got listed first even though there was no logical order outside of this oddity. There was no Judge1 as described by you or in my original post.

Or was there? Depends on how ISU mixes the scoring. I think all scores in the same column are indeed from a same judge but this judge would not be in the first column for another skater. So there was a Judge1 but we have no way of knowing how s/he scored other skaters to deduce any bias.

For fun: Here are the lowest scores of all skaters and averages of rest of panel:

I think Sunny was just mentioning the nationalities of the judging panel, not trying to match them up with the scores. I suppose that if any judge was showing bias against Patrick and favoring the Japanese men, it would be a sensible guess that it might be the Japanese judge (or the Czech judge, if one of the judges gave extra-generous scores to Verner).

On the other hand, some judges as individuals have a reputation for being especially tough, either overall or with respect to certain features of a program. Woe to the lady skater whose jumps are borderline under-rotated if she draws Japan's Junko Hiramatsu as technical controller!

By the way, I see that the Japanese judge for the men's event at the GP final (Yukika Okabe) also judged pairs and dance. I think this is a trend this year -- assigning the same judge to multiple disciplines -- to cut down on expenses.

I'm pretty sure. There was a big fuss about it last year when suddenly all the joint statistics/skating fans were cut off at the knees. I believe that George Rossano (mathematician/ISU data operator) tried to come up with some algorithms for matching up judges, but you need a serious data bank to do this successfully.

Before, even though the judges' were not identified by name, you could at least make an educated guess s to which judge was "judge number one" all down the line, etc. The ISU deliberately changed their procedure to foil this kind of detective work.

By the way, if I remember correctly the USFSA told the ISU, nuts to you and your secret judging -- at U.S. events (U.S. Nationals for instance) the judges' marks are all identified.

Edited to add:

Originally Posted by SkateFiguring

I think all scores in the same column are indeed from a same judge but this judge would not be in the first column for another skater.

Yes, I'm pretty sure that's right.

Originally Posted by SkateFiguring

At this point, I'm not sure how the judges' points get translated into the final GOE points for each element. They don't seem to be simple averages or as percentages of the element's base value.

Maybe I'll figure it out. After all I'm SkateFiguring.

On this page, click on Communication 1611, and scroll down for the values of the plus and minus GOEs for each element.

Math, You're right about how it goes. It became clear last year when a judge didn't show up for the event and the blank column with no scores were in different positions by skater, but all in the same vertical column within each skater's block of scores.